The gifts of a great play-by-play broadcaster are interwoven to the point where it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact appeal.

Is it genetic — the timbre of the voice — or the training, the timing and the descriptive ability to paint imaginative word pictures on airwaves?

Who knows?

All we know is that good broadcasters are prepared, masters at foreshadowing, avoid trafficking in cliches and explain the finer points of a game that enhances the experience for diehard and casual fan alike.

One of Canada’s best — Bob Irving of CJOB radio in Winnipeg — is so expert at his craft that the Blue Bombers have named the radio/press facilities at their new stadium, Investors Group Field, after the long-time broadcaster.

Last week’s announcement of the “Bob Irving Media Centre” left its namesake speechless.

“I’m blown away by this whole thing,” Irving told Ed Tait of the Winnipeg Free Press. “I’m humbled by it and almost embarrassed that such a fuss is made.

“It’s not the kind of thing you ever expect and I certainly would never have expected this.”

The 2013 CFL season will be Irving’s 39th as the Bombers’ play-by-play voice. His longevity behind the mike is approaching that of Bryan Hall who, for more than 50 years, was heard by 630 CHED listeners in Edmonton.

Hall, now 79, retired as the Eskimos play-by-play announcer in 2009 at the end of a career which began in 1965. He called Edmonton games continuously over those five decades, except for a three-year period when his good friend, Wes Montgomery, opened the window to the Eskimos’ world.

Like Irving, Hall was honoured by the football team with the naming of the “Bryan Hall Media Centre” at Commonwealth Stadium, where he still does a very public sing-along of the Eskimos fight song. In northern Alberta, Hall remains a figure of endearment as much as Harry Caray, the late Cubs announcer, was in Chicago. Caray made famous the seventh inning stretch at Wrigley Field with his rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Both Hall and Irving are tough acts to follow. Yet with the Lions about to celebrate their 60th season in the CFL, might this be a good time to reflect on the broadcasting career of J. Paul McConnell, who began his radio career in Vancouver in 1969 and will be forever twinned with the football team?

McConnell started doing play-by-play in 1982 at CFUN, moved to CKNW in 1984 and was still at it in 2004, when the ‘NW lost the Lions’ broadcast rights to the current holder, The Team 1040.

For a 10-year period, from 1979-89, McConnell’s “baggy eyes and hangdog face” (in the words of late Vancouver Sun columnist Denny Boyd) were seen regularly as the sports director on Vancouver television station CBUT. He was a straight-to-the-matter, no-frills, hard and accurate deliverer of sports news in the days when substance mattered more than style.

In 1996, McConnell was named to the media wing of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame during a time when the league was floundering and the Lions’ relevance in the Vancouver sports market was being questioned.

And yet, McConnell seemed impervious to it all, registering high on the professional meter, calling a terrific game with his sonorous, big-time voice, even when the team slumped to 3-15 and the attendance at B.C. Place sank along with it.

Sports is not just about the scores and the stats. It’s about context and back stories. And McConnell could make Lions fans excited about a rogue’s gallery of athletes they scarcely knew, because he had such a love for the CFL, its coaches and players.

McConnell was separated at birth with one of the league’s iconic figures — Ron Lancaster. The late CFL quarterback, head coach and CBC colour analyst defined the word cantankerous. But those players, assistant coaches and media members who looked deeper saw something else — a teddy bear. Prickly on the outside, warm on the inside, always professional and caring about the game and its people. Like McConnell.

Seven years ago this week, McConnell was let go in a restructuring of Corus Entertainment, the parent company of CKNW, and he now resides in France, of all places.

At 68, living off the Gulf of Lyon, on the western Mediterranean, close to the border with Spain, is not such a bad place for an old broadcaster to end up. Perhaps, the Lions can coax him out of his lounge chair to participate in the team’s diamond jubilee.

Indeed, it seems only right that McConnell be acknowledged in some form. Whether the Lions want to take it a step further — the J.P. McConnell Media Centre? — such coziness would not be out of line.

McConnell abhorred gush and syrup. And he would be uncomfortable with the phrase “CFL ambassador”, though, for thousands of Lions fans, he was as much a maker of memories as the players.

Echoes of his voice bring back football eras in Vancouver, both good and bad. He is intensely remembered by many because, over a large part of the Lions’ existence, McConnell was the medium who delivered the message in a thoroughly professional way.

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